Regardless of what industry you operate in, it’s common sense to rigorously test your product before releasing it for sale on the market. If your customers have chosen to spend their hard-earned cash on your offer, it should be a must to provide them with excellent quality.
This is the reason why publishing houses do several rounds of revisions for manuscripts or why manufacturers carry out numerous tests on their devices. If customers were to receive a book full of grammatical errors or a gadget that constantly crashed, these lapses could no doubt negatively affect these companies’ reputations.
The same idea goes for API testing, a process that ensures your API is working as intended. This can help your team catch any critical errors before the product reaches the end-users. Best of all, it can provide a host of other benefits to your company, too.
1. It is a reliable way to test the core functionality of the API.
Many developers make the mistake of relying solely on the UI testing phase to catch all possible API bugs. While UI testing is certainly an essential step of the process, it isn’t a fool-proof method for testing the strength of your build.
This is because UI testing simply triggers and runs the APIs, but does not necessarily run the necessary tests on them. Hence, the most dependable way to test an API is to do so at the coding level, far before applying a user interface of any kind. This way, developers can more easily uncover any small errors before they can snowball into bigger problems later in the development cycle.
2. It can save API teams a lot of time and effort down the line.
Another advantage of conducting testing at the coding level is that it is much faster to execute compared to UI testing, especially when utilizing a comprehensive API testing tool. Generally, one can expect to spend a full day or more running a few thousand UI tests. In comparison, it is possible to run a similar number of API tests in a fraction of the time—just a little under an hour, in fact.
While it may seem impractical at first to set aside time to run core functionality tests, it can save companies an incredibly significant number of hours in the long run. This, in turn, will give API designers more time to focus on more pressing or important development tasks.
3. It can help improve the overall quality of your API tests.
Unfortunately, end-user actions can be quite unpredictable, and teams may find themselves dealing with problems they never thought, were even possible. Consequently, developers must make sure that they’re not only testing their API based on ideal use cases.
Thus, developers can’t just do the bare minimum by running a small handful of API tests and calling it a day. Instead, decision-makers must make sure that they’re running enough of the right tests to cover even the most unlikely of scenarios. Additionally, this constant iteration of API tests will make the build more robust by pushing the build to its limits.
All in all, proper API testing is key to a successful product launch. Not only will it ensure that end-users get a solid build, but it will also give your team the peace of mind knowing that everything is working as intended. By taking advantage of both manual and automated checks, teams can efficiently integrate API testing into their development cycle, too.
As long as your company follows API testing best practices, you’re sure to deliver a comprehensive and stable final product.
